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LOW

xen: Some pmu and profiling hypercalls log without rate limiting on x86

Published Oct 30, 2015

Description

Xen 3.2.x through 4.6.x does not limit the number of printk console messages when logging certain pmu and profiling hypercalls, which allows local guests to cause a denial of service via a sequence of crafted (1) HYPERCALL_xenoprof_op hypercalls, which are not properly handled in the do_xenoprof_op function in common/xenoprof.c, or (2) HYPERVISOR_xenpmu_op hypercalls, which are not properly handled in the do_xenpmu_op function in arch/x86/cpu/vpmu.c.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat mitigation

The problematic log messages are issued with priority Warning. Therefore they can be rate limited by adding "loglvl=error/warning" to the hypervisor command line or suppressed entirely by adding "loglvl=error". On systems where the guest kernel is controlled by the host rather than guest administrator, running only kernels which do not call these hypercalls will also prevent untrusted guest users from exploiting this issue. However untrusted guest administrators can still trigger it unless further steps are taken to prevent them from loading code into the kernel (e.g. by disabling loadable modules etc) or from using other mechanisms which allow them to run code at kernel privilege.

Metrics

Weaknesses (1)

References (14)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner mitre
Published Oct 30, 2015
Updated Aug 6, 2024
Reserved Oct 23, 2015
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Moderate
Public date Oct 29, 2015